Our all-female college guaranteed a focus on academic achievement and extracurricular leadership we might have missed at a coed college. Women not only ran all the student activities―from student government to newspaper to clubs―but we also felt freer to take risks, make mistakes and even fail in front of one another. It was a given that the president of the class, the editor of the paper and top student in every field would be a woman. And it could be any of us. Unlike some of the smart girls in my high school, who felt pressure to forsake their own ambitions for more traditional lives, my Wellesley classmates wanted to be recognized for their ability, hard work and achievements. This may explain why there is a disproportionate number of women’s college graduates in professions in which women tend to be underrepresented.
The absence of male students cleared out a lot of psychic space and created a safe zone for us to eschew appearances―in every sense of the word―Monday through Friday afternoon. We focused on our studies without distraction and didn’t have to worry about how we looked when we went to class. But without men on campus, our social lives were channeled into road trips and dating rituals called “mixers.” When I arrived in the fall of 1965, the college still assumed the role of surrogate parent to the students. We couldn’t have boys in our rooms except from 2 to 5:30 P.M. on Sunday afternoons, when we had to leave the door partly open and follow what we called the “two feet” rule: two (out of four) feet had to be on the floor at all times. We had curfews of 1 A.M. on weekends, and Route 9 from Boston to Wellesley was like a Grand Prix racetrack Friday and Saturday nights as our dates raced madly back to campus so we wouldn’t get in trouble. We had reception desks in the entrance halls of each dorm where guests had to check in and be identified through a system of bells and announcements that notified us if the person wanting to see us was male or female. A “visitor” was female, a “caller” male. Notice of an unexpected caller gave you time to either get fixed up or call down to tell the student on duty you weren’t available.
My friends and I studied hard and dated boys our own age, mostly from Harvard and other Ivy League schools, whom we met through friends or at mixers. The music was usually so loud at those dances you couldn’t understand anything being said unless you stepped outside, which you only did with someone who caught your interest. I danced for hours one night at the Alumni Hall on our campus with a young man whose name I thought was Farce, only to learn later it was Forrest. I had two boyfriends serious enough to meet my parents, which, given my father’s attitudes toward anyone I dated, was more like a hazing than a social encounter. Both young men survived, but our relationships didn’t.
Given the tenor of the times, we soon chafed at Wellesley’s archaic rules and demanded to be treated like adults. We pressured the college administration to remove the in loco parentis regulations, which they finally did when I was college government President.
That change coincided with the elimination of a required curriculum that students also deemed oppressive.
Looking back on those years, I have few regrets, but I’m not so sure that eliminating both course requirements and quasi-parental supervision represented unmitigated progress.
Two of the courses I got the most out of were required, and I now better appreciate the value of core courses in a range of subjects. Walking into my daughter’s coed dorm at Stanford, seeing boys and girls lying and sitting in the hallways, I wondered how anyone nowadays gets any studying done.
By the mid-1960s, the sedate and sheltered Wellesley campus had begun to absorb the shock from events in the outside world. Although I had been elected President of our college’s Young Republicans during my freshman year, my doubts about the party and its policies were growing, particularly when it came to civil rights and the Vietnam War. My church had given graduating high school students a subscription to motive magazine, which was published by the Methodist Church. Every month I read articles expressing views that sharply contrasted with my usual sources of information. I also had begun reading The New York Times, much to my father’s consternation and Miss Fahlstrom’s delight. I read speeches and essays by hawks, doves and every other brand of commentator.
My ideas, new and old, were tested daily by political science professors who pushed me to expand my understanding of the world and examine my own preconceptions just when current events provided more than enough material. Before long, I realized that my political beliefs were no longer in sync with the Republican Party. It was time to step down as President of the Young Republicans.
My Vice President and friend, Betsy Griffith, not only became the new President, but stayed in the Republican Party, along with her husband, the political consultant John Deardourff. She fought hard to keep her party from taking a hard right turn and was a staunch supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. She obtained her Ph.D. in history and wrote a well-received biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton before putting her feminism and women’s education credentials to work as headmistress of the Madeira School for Girls in northern Virginia. All that, however, was far in the future when I officially left the
